Phone calls to return, shopping to buy, that dentist appointment for the kids, a friend's birthday coming up - so much to remember. You could try to keep track of day-to-day tasks by leaving little notes around your desk, but they're easily lost. PNotes offers a better way. Create virtual notes on your desktop, they're instantly saved, and can pop up scheduled reminders to make sure you don't forget the most important items.

The program is very simple to use. Just double-click the PNotes system tray icon when you want to record something, a new note will appear on the screen and you can type whatever you like (rich text formatting means you can change fonts, font sizes and colours, highlight text, add bulleted or numbered lists, and more).

Notes can be manually positioned somewhere on the screen, or automatically docked to the edge of your desktop. You can roll up notes to just the caption bar if they get in the way, hide them all for a moment (they can all be revealed again in three clicks), print them out for reference, even send them via email.

And a comprehensive scheduler means you can pop up reminders for a particular note just once, daily, weekly, monthly, even monthly at a particular day of the week (9:30am on the third Thursday of every month, say). The program can even track reminders that should have occurred while your PC was turned off, though this doesn't happen by default (right-click the system tray icon, select Preferences > Schedule and check "Track overdue reminders").

Verdict:

PNotes is packed with useful features, and is an excellent way to organise quick notes and reminders

Spotlight: Free Full Software

WhatsApp Messenger is the world's most popular instant messaging app for smartphones.

You can use it to send and receive text and voice messages, photos, videos, even call your friends in other countries, and because it uses your phone's internet connection it might not cost you anything at all (depending on whether you'll pay data charges).

It's easy to set up and use. There's no need to create and remember new account names or pins because it works with your phone number, and uses your regular address book to find and connect you with friends who use WhatsApp already.

You can talk one-to-one or in group chats, and because you're always logged in there's no way to miss messages. Even if your phone is turned off, WhatsApp will save your messages and display them as soon as you're back online.

There's plenty more (location sharing, contact exchange, message broadcasting) and the app is free for a year, currently $0.99/ year afterwards.